Even if hindsight delivers clarity, the lawyers on the firm’s executives were not inclined to ruminate retrospectively.

“It was a very difficult period for the firm. We had the task of trying to right things and we did what we could and it was a very interesting and challenging task,” says Bleiwas.

“There are probably things I would have done differently but I don’t think any of these things would have created any material difference in the outcome.”

Gary Luftspring, chair of the firm’s executive committee and formerly its long-standing managing partner, contends the closure was due to Goodman and Carr’s inability to change its platform and create a narrow focus to reconstitute business.

“We made a strategic decision that we either had to fundamentally change the platform, either a merger or changing some of the internal workings of the firms, be it by practice groups or the types of things we were doing or not doing either by recruiting new people or stopping doing certain types of work,” Luftspring says. He acknowledges that over recent years “we could never come up with enough leadership people. I think succession planning was a problem.”

Luftspring says Fiorenza’s selection as managing partner was short lived because he had a certain style that didn’t work. “That doesn’t mean it was the wrong style. . . . He’s a very successful, capable lawyer. Was he the right guy to be the managing partner at the time? Obviously, many people thought not.”

Bleiwas “did what he could but by then, to a certain extent, certain things had been cast,” Luftspring says.
On the concerns expressed by women in the firm, Luftspring suggests that’s a topic for the profession at large. “There is within just about any firm, with one or two exceptions, huge issues involving women. Look at how many women graduate versus how many women really succeed in major law firms,” he says.

“The ones who succeed, it’s very interesting that by and large, they have done so by sacrificing. How do you deal with . . . mat leaves, different family situations, different levels of responsibility? And it’s not that it can’t be done or that women can’t succeed,” he says. “I don’t think we as a profession have worked out a model that particularly works.”

He concurs the firm didn’t have an official integration program for laterals, despite the aggressive focus on their hire. “You integrate as well as your lawyers allow it to happen and some lawyers integrated very well and others did not.”

Luftspring, now at Ricketts Harris LLP in Toronto, doesn’t see the point to exit interviews. “How much useful information are you really going to get?”

But ultimately, he says, if there was one thing the firm might have done differently, it would have been being “tougher” on people. “When you are tremendously successful you have to be tougher on who you are and what you want to be,” he says. “We were not as able to be as dictatorial and ruthless as maybe we should have been, especially when times are good,” he says. “I think that’s the time to make very, very tough decisions and we were never, as a firm, tremendously good at making those very tough decisions about people.”

At the time of this interview, Luftspring and the remaining partners at the firm were shoveling through 29 years of files pulled from storage. “The irony is there are very few rules with respect to storage of files. The law society doesn’t really mandate any destruction policies. And the truth is lawyers, not wanting to make any decisions, do nothing as opposed to when you’re in a small firm, you throw stuff out,” Luftspring remarks. “Let me tell you, I will have very different practices on a go-forward basis.”

End of an era

As might others, Goodman and Carr’s closure marks the end of an era; a final curtain on what, in its heyday, had been home to 140 lawyers. Some are glad founding partner Wolfe Goodman, who died last year, didn’t witness the demise. Donald Carr, now 78, politely apologized for not having time to speak about the closure. “We are, right now, going through thousands and thousands and thousands of files. . . . I’m meeting with clients in the evenings.” He was moving over to Miller Thomson LLP.

Equity partners don’t expect their investment back. “That’s very disturbing to many people, including myself,” says Barry Tarshis.

Like a sunset in the rearview mirror, the light fades, this time for good.

Look closely. “Are there other firms that can learn something?” queries Luftspring. “Maybe.”